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Dezi
2008-03-13, 03:26 PM
I am trying to make a family of 5 tube steel pieces--two long horizontal pieces and 3 pieces spaning between them)--that would frame out a mech unit opening. (I wanted to just make a group, but my boss is family-happy and wants to put minimal user input into any project, but that is a different subject.) Basically all 5 pieces need to be variable in length and spacing. Easy, right? Well I started from a beam family because technically they are all beams. I layed out the ref planes and parameters. The ref planes flex perfectly, but when I put in the tube steel elements the two long elements wont flex. The other three pieces flex just fine, but when I change the length of the long pieces Revit makes me remove the end constraint and then only moves the ref plane without stretching the tube steel. Any idea why this is happening?

Andre Carvalho
2008-03-13, 04:12 PM
What you can do is to create each piece in one family and flex it. Then you open an empty family and nest all the pieces together, adding parameters and linking the parameters to the ones from the nested families.

And when creating your famlies, name and use reference planes to lock things to it. Avoid locking objects to another objects. It will avoid most of the circular chain of constraints.

Andre Carvalho

Dezi
2008-03-13, 09:06 PM
I always name the ref planes and always lock only to the planes. I thought of nesting the families, but for some reason it wont flex that one element even if it is the only one. Thanks for the help; I will keep working on it and see what I can figure out.

asaastad
2008-03-13, 11:32 PM
One idea that might work... and this is based of of I haven't seen what you have already done in terms of where your ref planes are placed.

I'm maxing out my RAM on a huge file right now so I can't test this out. But I'm sure there's enough info for someone else to.

Hope it helps. What I have a feeling will not work that well are the intermediate beams. I highly doubt they will work the way you want them to, Dezi. At least not from the plane the parameters are referenced off of. I am also not certain if they will move freely via alignments or something instead of having to manually enter in the distance for each one.